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Tag Archives: Startups

Welcome. About a year ago, I started my first blog (My Type of Place). I had always enjoyed writing and thought that starting a blog would motivate me to work on it more consistently. This idea worked for a time. It worked especially well when I attempted to use this blog to catapult myself into a new career and I even attempted to commercialize the idea inspiring my blog (you can read about it here). While the company never took off (it seemed to require a more sophisiticated search algorithm than I had initially anticipated; however, if there are any developers out there who find the idea interesting, and would like to collaborate on trying to get it off the ground, let me know as I now have some time on my hands and still think it is a really cool concept that could potentially have some success as a mobile app or website. Some people at American Express agree also, because they’ve tried to launch something somewhat similar- read about that here (Article)

Anyway, the reason I’ve come into some unexpected free time is that I was just laid off last week. This job, in a way, did stem from my interest in startups that grew out of the work I was doing on the blog about a year ago. However, while it was a really exciting and a tremendously valuable learning experience to enter a well-funded startup software company as employee number 12 and ride out the wave, seeing the company grow from sharing space in one of our VC backer’s offices, to nearly 40 employees, a dozen or so customers (half of which I sourced in the first year of business), and continuing to grow. Near the end, I had come to the decision that I didn’t want a future as a salesman, therefore making my role as an inside sales associate make much less sense.

In looking at it from some (though not much) distance, I’m understandably a little disappointed at being laid off (as who wouldn’t be), especially because I truly liked and respected most of the people I worked with there. However, at the moment, I think I’m most upset that now when I go to a certain burger place (which I happen to like quite a bit and is just around the corner from my apartment), I am of my first experience in getting laid off…

So how did this inspire me to start blogging again?

Well first, I now have some free time on my hands, at least in the interim, until I decide on the next step in my meandering early career and find the right position to move on to. Additionally, in my job search (probably a whole post to come on this later), I’ve focused initially on entry-level marketing positions. Not surprisingly, many of these positions either ask for links to my social media accounts, blogs, or other writing samples. If not, they at least ask for extended written responses in the initial applications.

In particular, when I applied to the Boston Startup School yesterday, and they asked for the link to any of my blogs, I couldn’t believe that the last entry toMTOP came on January 8th, 2012, just over a year ago.

The first idea for one of the topics of this blog came from one of the other questions in the application- “what are your goals for the coming week?” Immediately, I had one answer to the question, in that I had already decided to make an effort to get out and explore some new parts of Boston, starting with the North End. However, in thinking about my old blog, and my desire to get back into writing, I incorporated the idea that I would try to visit one new place/do something different each day and write a little something about it.

This task would give some structure to my return to writing (similar to how I pledged to write 5 pages a day in the first few months of taking a year off between my freshman and sophomore years of college, when I decided to write a screenplay and before my parents forced me to find a “real (read income-producing) job”). From there, I knew that I’d also been meaning to write about all of the movies I watch and have watched in the past. I certainly spend enough time doing this and have even started to do so a few times, but at least I keep coming back to it.